Have just seen that “Acorn Antiques — the Musical” that we saw in London last year is to go on tour, and will call in on Nottingham en route.
See here for more details.
Fancy a game…
… of keepy-uppy?
French fantasies
Over the last few years of visiting friends who have retired to France, I have been developing my own increasingly sophisticated fantasies of moving there myself.
Don’t get me wrong, I love living in Nottingham. MORI polls show that most of the people who live here would recommend the place to others, and that’s true of me too. So while it’s more or less by accident that I live here (of a small set of universities that offered the course I wanted, Nottingham was the one that combined the prestige with a beautiful campus that at the time was the halfway house between city living and the life in the country I was used to) there’s plenty that keeps me here. At Christmas, I love it when people ask for obscure CDs long after last posting rules out Amazon, and I can be pretty sure of finding it in the shops. I love being able to buy pretty much anything I need just by getting a bus into town. I love the theatres and the cinemas and the art galleries and museums, although I don’t go to any of them as often as I should. I love what as a councillor I have learned to call “my district shopping centre” where I can do all of the shopping and restauranting I need when I don’t quite fancy a trek into the city centre.
But still a secret half of me is longing for life on the other side of the channel.
The fantasy has various different phases.
1) The flat in Paris
I have very fond memories of the six months or so I lived in Paris when I was a student. All the facets of city life I enjoy at the moment I could continue. Late-nite life in the all-night cafés. A developed social life for gentlemen who, what’s the phrase, share a common interest in musical theatre and physical fitness. Absolute certainty of “haut debit” internet connections.
And, compared to, ooh, say, houses in Nottingham, modest flats in the déclassé areas of Paris are actually quite affordable.
2) The former farmhouse
The second variety of the fantasy is buying up a rural idyll somewhere in the Hexagone and soaking up the isolation. The friends I stayed with last week spent roughly in Euro what we spent in pounds for our present house. We got a 3 bed semi in the suburbs with a medium-sized garden; they got 24 acres of farmland, a small cider orchard, anything up to 11 outbuildings in various states of disrepair, resident owls, swallows, deer, and inordinate numbers of beetles, and glorious solitude when they choose it. On the other side, we have cable broadband and mains sewerage, and they have a septic tank they have yet to locate and four miles of telephone cable serving only their house that doesn’t seem to be a high priority for repair should someone accidentally fell a tree onto it.
Were I to follow this little fantasy, I’d settle down, buy milk and cheese from my neighbours, keep chickens and an eccentric number of cats, grow my own food, live simply, rising with the sun and going to bed early, etc. etc.
I never actually managed to grow and eat anything. This year, the beans refused to come up. Two years ago, given how many slug pellets I’d put on the tomatoes, I was chary of eating them. The one year I did successfully grow runner beans, I forgot to pinch out the tops, so they got all straggly and unmanageable, and I got about a plateful.
And the sad fact is there are a lot of English expats in France unable to cope with living alone in the countryside ostracised by the locals whose language they’ve made little effort to learn, but unable to move back to Blighty because the differential between property prices doesn’t work so well in the other direction when your savings are exhausted.
3) Self-build
One feature of French living is that land is cheaper than in England, and more widely available. So building the home of your dreams from scratch is a more obtainable dream. I was hugely impressed at the ultra-sustainable housing at the Hockerton Housing Project when I visited as part of a Council report into climate change, so a frequent fantasy is of building myself a South-facing earth-sheltered dwelling that doesn’t need any heating apart from the solar hot water panels. I’d probably grow my own food here too.
Anyway, nice fantasies, but not likely to come to fruition any time soon. But more than enough to keep my mind occupied whilst my hands are mechanically operating a printing rig keeping the next 10,000 leaflets churning out.
Google Hit of the Day
Someone found me whilst googling “Vegetarian members of the UK Conservative Party”
I’m intrigued now. I don’t know of any. I do know lots of veggie Lib Dems, but not sure if I can think off the top of my head whether any of them are in the public eye.
Worra week
I’ve had a fab time on holiday in Normandy for the past week, staying with new friends and old. A 12 hour journey (well, not quite – leave Nottingham 2am, arrive destination 2pm, but there’s a clock change, and lots of sitting on the tarmac at Dover included) took me to my first destination, a housewarming on a farmhouse in a farm located within a national forest. The minute I arrived in France, torrential rain began, making the driving a little stressful, and pitching a tent unpleasant. After the long motorway drive, I turned into the forest, past cross looking signs warning against interloping, and found a roomful of washed out campers warming up with soup around a fire.
After only four hours, however, the rain stopped, the sun came out, and the party continued. I’d perforce arrived on the third day of partying, missing the apparently wonderful weather of the days before. Sunday evening at the housewarming weekend took in plenty of food and drink, lots of sitting around chatting, some diablo training and the Entertainment: an impromptu gig played by the children of our host and their friends, on a stage built in an outbuilding and equipped with a serious array of lighting equipment that somehow managed to survive the rain. Much later that night, the evening descended into sing-song as a really expert guitarrist picked up an abandoned instrument and played whatever we sang at him, more or less in whatever key we started in.
I stayed at the farmhouse for two more days as the party crowd thinned out until eventually it was just me and my charming hosts. The Monday took in a birthday meal, Tuesday we went to the beach. I was anticipating eating vegan all weekend since my hosts were, but the party-goers had stocked their fridge with eggs, cheese and meat of various sorts so in fact I was doing a service by eating up the foodstuffs they would have had no use for. And I offered to help out around the farm too, knackering my back by washing up at a kitchen sink installed painfully low, digging a vegetable plot over and finding the local tip and working out what you had to do to use it.
On Wednesday, I finally left my hosts to enjoy the silence of the farm (except in certain wind directions, you really can hear nothing but birds, insects and the wind. At night, there’s an owl and deer barking in the forest to contend with and lizards and voles scrabbling in the hay) and drove off to Dinard to collect P, then back into Normandy to stay with old friends in the Caen vicinity.
In fact, Caen was part-way through a Voice Festival, so our evenings were taken up with a Kings Singers concert one night, and the second, a concert given by the Chorale Arioso, the choir our hosts sing with. Post-concert, we joined the choir in the beach house of one of their members for a bring-and-share meal and my second late-night drunken sing-song that week!
The evening was a great chance to practice my French again. There were plenty of moments when I got lost – in particular, I find it very hard to hear one voice speaking when there’s a crowd of voices (then again, that’s tricky in English too) – but I managed to understand and make myself understood most of the evening. Even through the very lengthy and repeated conversations about bras that my host had to explain later. “Soutien-gorge” is the French for bra, despite the fact that it really doesn’t support your neck. In technical bra-speak, cups are “bonnets” and you speak of “profondeur de bonnet” for cup size. “Rougir” is the French for “to blush”.
By Friday it was time to return to Blighty, so an early start followed by a quick trip to a French hypermarket, then the 12 hour journey back. Man, the M1 was nasty on Friday night, even when the delayed ferry meant we didn’t hit the London Orbital til gone 7pm. There were massive roadworks, and a long delay for an accident on the M25. The roadworks I had driven through days previously, but at 4am they didn’t delay me at all, apart from dropping to 40mph through the average speed checks. But on Friday night heading north in the early evening, they were a major delay. We’d had discussions about whether we should go M1 or A1, and chose the M1 because it’s a better drive, and gets us closer to Nottingham. But with hindsight, I suspect the A1 is going to be a safer bet during the day until 2008, when the roadworks are due to be completed. Delays expected until 2008, mon dieu!
Further pictures of the week are here.
Dear fans
Those who enjoyed my Librivox recording of Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Affair at Styles may be interested to know that I have completed a recording of H G Wells’s Invisible Man.
Many thanks to all at LV who helped get the files out into the public domain, by proof-listening and co-ordinating the project, particularly Betsie who got the cataloguing done whilst moving house!
For my next solo project, I have chosen Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. At some point, I shall set myself the target of recording it in 80 days. But I will have my holiday first, I feel.
Chapters I have recorded for other projects are listed on my podcasting page. I am also currently book-coordinator for a recording of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which has proven to be challenging. I might also be about to do a vegetarian cookery book from the early 1900s. New volunteers are always welcome.
One final thing to note. When I recorded Styles, it was amongst the first to be ready. One of very few — it might even have been the first solo project, or maybe I was pipped to that post. But take a look at the catalogue today, less than a year later. There are hundreds of texts in there now – testament to thousands of hours put in by volunteers around the world to recording the texts and doing all the vital work that results in having a fantastic website built around the recordings.
Yay us! *clicks*
By-election special
I’m one of those people who thought, the minute they heard about the Bromley by-election, that it was worth firing up a browser, logging into Betfair and punting a wodge of Dunfermline profits on the result. It was long odds at the time, what with the Lib Dems being in third place and the Tories looking way ahead.
Just recently, newly blogging Lib Dem peer Eric Lubbock, now Lord Avebury, weighed in to show up how similar the situation is now in Bromley and Chislehurst to the very nearby seat of Orpington, which was won by the Liberals in a by-election in 1962. Wikipedia says this was the start of a great Liberal Revival, that Eric Lubbock went on to hold the seat for eight years, and within months, the Liberals became the most popular party in the country.
Winning is no longer looking completely impossible now. People on the doorstop are responding positively, I hear from impartial sources (and of course from HQ who send me daily slips as a previous by-election attendee to remind me that it’s a two-horse race, every effort needed, send cash if you can’t come yourself). Apparently no-one mentions Cameron when you knock on doors, but they do seem to agree with the outrage in our leaflets about “Three Jobs Bob” the Conservative candidate. Poor Dave also got villified in the local press when he visited.
And now, in an amusing twist, it seems that one of those jobs might actually be a bar to the Conservative taking office, and moreover mean his declaration form was fraudulent. RecessMonkey is reporting that, as a member of a Strategic Health Authority, the Tory candidate is barred from standing for election under a 1975 act. Even attempting to stand means he’s filled in a fraudulent declaration.
Time will tell. So far, it’s only Recess, and people reading Recess running with this. The truth will out.
I haven’t been able to go this time, and come polling day, I will be away, abroad. I’ll just have to hope some kind soul texts me the result.
Updates
Well, I have my car back now. Apparently “all four” ignition coils needed replacing. The car is much nippier and smoother now and far less prone to stalling. Several of the problems I’d put down to teething troubles, getting used to the car, and less than expert driving can actually now be attributed to the nearly-dead ignition coils. And they fixed everything under the warranty, after I got a little stroppy with them about cars that fell apart barely five weeks after being purchased from a dealer hitherto considered reputable. I didn’t even have to threaten them with trading standards. Or stand in the middle of the dealership and say in my best public speaking voice, “Excuse me everyone, I have something important to tell you about the level of post-sales service you can expect.”
Smudge — he hasn’t been back to have his ultrasound yet. I’m hoping we can get him an appointment in July after I come back off me hol. He doesn’t seem to distressed, and both cats are increasingly happy at home, even if both of them are very quiet purrers. Keep an eye on my Flickr tag “cat” for the latest photos as I don’t want to bore everyone by updating you on the latest cute thing the cats have done, like reading council papers, or queuing up to lick meat juice off my thumb, or peering through windows or pure and simple box-sitting.
Time goes by… So slowly
Stuck on a go-slow on the goods line while they repair a section of mainline. The train sounds like it’s running worse than my car!
Back on the train
On Tuesday some weird shaped orange thing started flashing on my dashboard and the whole car started shuddering when idle. The light turned out to be the toxic fume filter warning light, so I phoned the dealer who cheerfully told me that the car would try and regenerate the filter by itself if I drove over 50 mph for a while. I was dubious of this but promised to spend some time on the motorway caning it. Which I duly did. The car got worse and worse while I did so and really struggled to get to *coff* 70. This morning, it would barely start. Now it has a warning light saying “check injection” so back to the dealer it goes and back on the train go I. At least that gave me a chance to get them to replace the handbrake and repair some paint chips. Thank goodness for lifetime warranty.
Niles's Blog 